Keep Climbing!

Day two in Cinque Terre dawned bright and beautiful again, and we decided to start it with our second "walk" between towns, starting from the fourth town, Vernazza (where we were staying) and "walking" to the third town, Corniglia. Well, it qualified as a walk once we'd managed to gain enough altitude to be moving horizontally rather than vertically. Actually it was quite easy compared with the first "walk" we did from Monterosso to Vernazza (see here).

And the views were still spectacular.

We even stumbled across some stonemasons building a wall along the way.

And then we reached the tiny little town of Corniglia.

These are the light fittings in the little pizzeria where we ordered ourselves our first Quatro Formaggio pizza (four cheeses). Aren't they great? Made of little cake tins!

And then of course we had to go and enjoy our pizza with a view.

The actual view, when you moved closer to that railing, was this. There was a beautiful little beach at the bottom of the cliff.

Can you see that tiny little crab-like white thing next to the really big rock towards the bottom left of this picture? That's a girl in the water. It was so incredibly clear that you could see each limb underwater.

We decided that we were going to make our way down and then across to that little patch of white (that looks like sand but is actually rocks) on the top right of the cove. That involved a little bit of walking over slippery submerged rocks which is always fun when you're fully clothed, but we made it unscathed.

And then enjoyed this view.

Someone had left little rocks piled up like this all over the little beach.

And then of course we had the very difficult task of amusing ourselves while enjoying the view. I managed.

So did Tom.

Eventually we decided we'd enjoyed enough relaxation, so we climbed back up to the top, and enjoyed this view on our way. In case you're wondering, the rocky thing in the foreground is actually someone's roof. It would appear that they concrete rocks on the roof at regular intervals to hold down the roof tiles.

We then decided to set out on our third walk between towns, from Corniglia to Manarola (the second town). We got confused about the signs for a bit, and ended up walking the road for a while, and found yet more three-wheelers!

We negotiated stairs that were at the bottom of a waterfall (a small one)...

And then strolled past deserted shacks and playgrounds. We started wondering if we'd come completely the wrong way, which we thought would have been impossible since generally the way to get from one town to another is virtually along the coast, and as you can see, we were walking along the coast!

We hit a lovely little beach...

And some very colourful foliage...

And then we hit a very rusty, very closed gate. Which I didn't think to take a photo of at the time, because it wasn't very pretty. It would appear that the walk from Corniglia to Manarola has been closed for some time because of a landslide, and it doesn't look like it's opening any time soon!

So, we decided to hop straight on a train back to our little apartment in Vernazza, where we acquired some fresh basil (which we couldn't get the previous night), and reheated the enormous quantity of leftovers from last night's dinner, for lunch.

And used the tiny little sink in the bathroom to do some much-needed laundry, hanging it on the cute little out-the-kitchen-window washing line.

We then hopped back on a train to Manarola, since we'd bumped into an Australian couple that we'd originally met on our tour of the Isle of Capri, and they had invited us to come and see the gorgeous little house they'd rented along the cliff at Manarola. This was their view.

We sat there enjoying that beautiful view (and the fantastic company), until the last possible moment before we had to catch the very last train back to Vernazza. Not a bad close to our second day in paradise!

I even took a photo of our European washing line to add to our collection as we arrived home.